The parliamentary majority that will support a new Government of Pedro Sánchez is the most heterodox in democracy. An architecture of disparate parties that makes negotiation very complex. Since 23-J, all attention has been focused on finding the finishing touch, on obtaining the indispensable votes of Junts in exchange for an amnesty. The contacts continue and the PSOE confirms that they are making progress. But the acting president has wanted to accelerate and at the end of last week he ordered that talks be promoted for a joint program with Sumar, his partner in the coalition Executive.. Because the investiture is not a mirage in the hands of Carles Puigdemont, it has solid foundations.

Until then, the contacts had made little progress and had never touched on the thorniest issues.. The fear of Yolanda Díaz's platform was that, despite the commitment to conclude the pact in October, the PSOE would delay it until the end, close with Junts beforehand and force them to give in to their demands.. That fear remained until a few days ago when, they explain, the socialists changed their strategy. In Sumar they believe that Sánchez realized that time is running out – if there is no investiture before November 27, new elections will be held on January 14 – and that he needs to make agreements now.

The photo of the president and Díaz sends a message inside and outside the party that there will be a Government and puts their political project in black and white. The PSOE still has to seal pacts with PNV, ERC, Bildu and BNG and, of course, Junts. Now, socialist sources assure, “everyone is clearer about the Executive they are going to support”. The progress with Sumar, they maintain, can “encourage” the rest to understand that “the time has come”. Nobody dares to say that it speeds up because the plenary session for Sánchez to gain the confidence of the Chamber remains undated, but they do point out that this movement is not free. Some daring people are already dreaming of the week of November 6 “if nothing goes wrong”. But those who are really in the thick of it consider it a “mistake” to bet on a date.

With the prospect of an investiture “as soon as possible”, contacts with Sumar were given air in recent days, although the thorniest issues were not resolved until the meeting that Sánchez and the second vice president held on Monday morning. There, the socialist leader agreed to include some of the issues that his partners demanded of him: the tightening of the corporate tax and the possibility of a tax reform, the reduction of the working day and the development of the housing law..

From that moment on, the work was once again in the hands of the negotiators, first within the team formed in Sumar and, later, with Nacho Álvarez and María Jesús Montero as interlocutors on each side, who continued with the conversations electronically. , by video call, and they did not finish until dawn. The delay forced the subsequent staging to be improvised, with the Council of Ministers' press conference taking place for the first time at 10:30 to allow time for the signing ceremony between Sánchez and Díaz, who later flew to Brussels.. The parties that make up Sumar went to bed with the certainty that the agreement was not yet closed and had breakfast with the call of the president and vice president.

Podemos, increasingly distant from Yolanda Díaz, wanted to make it clear through Irene Montero that he did not know the detail. The tension between the purples and Sumar's management does not stop increasing. They feel mistreated, but no one doubts that the vote of their five deputies is guaranteed in the investiture. Sánchez has left it in the hands of the vice president to resolve their internal conflict and decide what weight they will have in their share of the Government – with the exception of the veto of both of them against Montero and the president's intention not to give up the Ministry of Equality this time -. Integration or not into the Podemos coalition Executive may be key to stability.

For now, it is worth it to the PSOE that the pact with Sumar has been achieved without fanfare, without the constant confrontations it has endured on its left, and Ferraz's message is that the image of Sánchez and Díaz has “political value”. The coalition government, they insist, has a solid foundation, now it is a matter of finishing off its parliamentary support.

But the PNV already showed yesterday its rejection of “its own agendas”. For weeks he has been warning that “ideological laws” will have to be circumvented, because the majority, with his formation and Junts, from the center-right spectrum, is more heterogeneous. In the socialist leadership, they maintain that what worries them the most is a “possible conflict of powers” and that about this, they assure, they should not fear, because everything “has to be substantiated in the normative development of the measures.”.

The socialists this Tuesday felt very optimistic, although caution prevails because Junts has taken the promise of discretion very seriously and is suspicious of all the information that comes from the PSOE. Insinuating a date is like “putting a gun to their temple,” they point out in the party. But the negotiation is going on, and another piece of evidence is that Ferraz yesterday did not attach any importance to the vote of the bases of the Consell de la República on the investiture.. Of the 90,484 registered in the Consell of the Republic, only 4,021 voted, which represents 4.45% of the activists. Of them, 3,009 members, 74.9%, want to boycott it.

The PSOE leadership must now promote consultation among its members so that they can rule on the government agreement with Sumar, as required by the statutes.. It has never been on the table that they do so on the pact with Junts, just as it was not done in the previous legislature with ERC. On Saturday the Federal Committee was convened to approve this statement by the militancy. That day the spirit of the socialist officials can be tested again. But the feeling that there will be a Government has been perennial, with hardly any ups or downs, since the same night of July 23rd.